Bush: public must guard against more shootings

US President George Bush said tonight that mass shootings are a reminder that people must be willing to raise a red flag about others’ disturbing behaviour.

"One of the lessons of these tragedies is to make sure that when people see somebody or know somebody who is exhibiting abnormal behaviour, you do something about it, to suggest that somebody take a look,2 the President said during an appearance at a high school in Ohio.

Cho Seung-Hui shot and killed 32 people and committed suicide on Monday in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern US history.

In between his shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, he found time to mail a package of writings, photos and videos to the NBC television network.

Fellow students said he was picked on at school.

"If you are a parent and your child is, you know, doing strange things on the internet, pay attention to it and not be afraid to ask for help and not be afraid to say ’I am concerned about what I am seeing,"’ Mr Bush said.

Long before he massacred 32 people in the worst mass shooting in US history, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was bullied by fellow students at school, who mocked his shyness and the strange way he talked, former classmates said.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech student who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant, who portrayed himself as persecuted and ranted about rich kids in a chilling video first broadcast last night, almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.

Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud and, when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled.

Finally, after the teacher threatened him to give him a failing grade, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

"As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ’Go back to China,"’ Davids said.

The high school classmates’ accounts add to the psychological portrait that is beginning to take shape, and could shed light on Cho’s state of mind in the video rant he mailed to NBC in the middle of his rampage on Monday at Virginia Tech.

NBC received the package yesterday. It contained a rambling and often incoherent 23-page written statement from Cho, 28 video clips and 43 photos - many of them showing Cho brandishing handguns.

"Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats," Cho, who came to the US in 1992 and whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington, said in the often-incoherent video.

"Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything".

Among the victims of the massacre were two other Westfield High graduates: Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated from the high school last year. Police said it is not clear whether Cho singled them out.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, a fellow member of Cho’s graduating class at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school.

But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told her they recalled him getting picked on there.

"There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him," Ms Roberts said.

"He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him."

Virginia Tech student Alison Heck said a roommate of hers on campus, Christina Lilick , found a mysterious question mark scrawled on the noticeboard on her door. Lilick went to the same high school as Cho, according to Lilick’s Facebook page.

Cho once scrawled a question mark on the sign-in sheet on the first day of a literature class, and other students came to know him as "the question mark kid".

"I don’t know if she knew that it was him for sure," Ms Heck said.

"I do remember that that fall that she was being stalked and she had mentioned the question mark. And there was a question mark on her door".

She added: "She just let us know about it just in case there was a strange person walking around our suite".

Ms Lilick could not immediately be located for comment, via email or telephone.

Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, said she was in several classes with Cho in high school, including advanced-placement calculus and Spanish.

She said he walked around with his head down, and almost never spoke. And when he did, it was "a real low mutter, like a whisper".

As part of an exam in Spanish class, students had to answer questions in Spanish on tape, and other students were so curious to know what Cho sounded like that they waited eagerly for the teacher to play his recording, she said. She said that on the tape, he did not speak confidently but did seem to know Spanish.

Ms Wilder recalled high school teachers trying to get him to participate, but "he would only shrug his shoulders or he’d give like two-word responses, and I think it just got to the point where teachers just gave up because they realised he wasn’t going to come out of the shell he was in, so they just kind of passed him over for the most part as time went on".

If he did not speak English well, there were several other Korean students he could have reached out to for friendship, but he did not, she said.

Ms Wilder said Cho was not any friendlier in college, where "he always had that same damn blank stare, like glare, on his face. And I’d always try to make eye contact with him because I recognised the kid because I’d seen him for six years, but he’d always just look right past you like you weren’t there".

In other developments, Governor Timothy Kaine is appointing a five to seven-member panel to investigate the shootings, the governor’s office said today. The panel will review Cho’s mental health history and how police responded to the tragedy.

The panel, which will include former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, will submit a report in two to three months.

University officials also announced that all of Cho’s student victims would be awarded degrees posthumously, and that other students terrorised by the shootings might be allowed to end the semester immediately without consequences.

Nine people hurt in the attack remained hospitalised, at least one in serious condition.

Authorities yesterday disclosed that more than a year before the massacre, Cho had been accused of sending unwanted messages to two women and was taken to a psychiatric hospital on a magistrate’s orders and was pronounced a danger to himself.

He was released with orders to undergo outpatient treatment.

With a backlash developing against the media for airing the videos of the gunman, Fox News said it would stop running them, and other US networks said they would severely limit their use.

"It has value as breaking news," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider, "but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam".